Tag: brewerytown

Brewerytown’s evolution continues apace with last week’s opening of Shifty’s Taco (odd name, that) at 27th and Girard. Jeb Woody, owner of Honey’s Sit N Eat, is a partner in the business, which gives it immediate street cred among Girard Avenue’s other relatively new Brewerytown-renaissance evangelists: Mugshots, Ryebrew, Best in Show Grooming, Icy Signs, Chicken Master and MM Partners.

Now comes Peter Maxwell Ochester, a Brewerytown resident who spent the past 20 years traveling cross-country collecting records–as in, vinyl LPs–and who now wants share his haul with others. “The dream,” he writes on the gofundme.com page he launched this week, “is turning into a brick and mortar vinyl shop.”

Photo of one of Sean Barton's creations. Barton has recently done work in Brewerytown.

In Brewerytown, developers MM Partners are celebrating the handiwork of sign painter Sean Barton, who recently created a typeface for house numbers on their properties on the 2900 block of West Girard Avenue. Here’s a short video of the doors, as well as some of Barton’s other work.

With fraughtconversation over vacant land and properties in the news almost every day, it’s gratifying to see the occasional example of what can be done when one individual decides to fight for a dilapidated building and turn it around.

Case in point: This creatively reinvented, highly livable two-bedroom home on a side street was just an abandoned corner rowhouse when a local photographer Jacob Hellman, a collagist and scholar of abandoned buildings, fell in love with it. He liked the location, in particular: One block from Fairmount Park, in a neighborhood some would call Strawberry Mansion but a realtor would call Brewerytown, the house is tucked away on a quiet street, across from an empty field, in an eerie but oddly soothing post-industrial landscape. He also liked the fact that it had a south-facing sidewall that would afford the opportunity down the line for passive solar heating modification.

Once he was able to buy the home, Hellman transformed it from shabby dereliction into one of the neighborhood’s most unique private homes.

The 2800 block of Cambridge Street, on the edge of Brewerytown, is quiet and narrow, lined by a combination of homes with high stone stoops and houses with wooden porches that could have been airlifted from Mt. Airy. Like the rest of that neighborhood on the rise, Cambridge is a street of contradictions, but a pretty one in a convenient location. Just a block away on Girard Avenue, new businesses like Mugshots, Rybrew and Brewerytown Beats have popped up, increasingly gentrifying the area. Perhaps the biggest indication of change in the neighborhood? The soon-to-open Shifty’s Tacos, an eatery from the crew at Honey’s Sit ’n Eat.

Here’s what we want to say to startup Kwelia: If loving you is wrong, we don’t wanna be right. The self-professed data geeks help real estate professionals by collecting and analyzing information about the rental market: what’s hot, what’s trending, what competitive pricing would look like.

That doesn’t necessarily sound like it would be to a consumer’s benefit. But Kwelia also provides info about Philadelphia rentals and free tools to regular folk. Take, for instance, the company’s interactive heat map of rental prices in Philadelphia for the month of May: It’s a really helpful look at what’s going on in the city in terms of affordability–as long as you understand the reasons behind the prices.

Philly has 10 City Council districts, and according to data analysis by NewsWorks, one of them leads the rest in property tax delinquencies. But it’s not necessarily the one that you’d think.

The 8th District (above), like all Council districts, is oddly shaped and includes disparate neighborhoods–everywhere from 22nd and Allegheny to Stenton and Hillcrest avenues. Represented by Cindy Bass, the 8th owes $94,151,727–the most of any of the 10 districts.